Essay on Organizational Transformation and Change

Question 1: Define Organization transformation. How is it different from organization development?
Organization transformation is a process of radical changes in the organization which include change of organizational culture, integrated strategic change and organization design change. Organization transformation cannot be compared with organization development. Organization development is a process which helps to improve organization productivity and effectiveness. Organization development strategies stand for the total change in the organization while organization transformation represents an abrupt change of different processes in the organization including management processes and organization culture.

Question 2: What are the environmental and internal disruptions that can affect an organization? Give examples.
The environmental and internal disruptions that can affect an organization include product life cycle shift which requires certain business strategies to be implemented; internal company dynamics which stand for some serious changes in corporate portfolio strategy and executive turnover; industry discontinuities including some abrupt changes concerning the legal, economic and political issues which are important for competition in the market.

Question 3: What are the key features of integrated strategic change and how are they related to each other?
The key features of integrated strategic change include the organization strategic orientation which is connected with strategy and organization design; strategic plan which should be supported, planned and executed as one integrated process; all the employees of the organization should be integrated into the process of change in order to succeed and to achieve the major organizational goals.

Question 4: Explain what is meant by organization design? What difficulties would you expect if you intended to change organization in this manner?
Organization design stands for a process which reshapes organization structure and management systems, human resources and information systems. It is also connected with work design and strategy. The difficulties which can occur in the process of organization change in this manner are related to problems with design components. For example, problems in the area of human resources can ruin preliminary plans of the organization design. All the employees must be motivated for the successful implementation of the new organization design.

Question 5: Explain the difference between mechanistic and organic design and give examples.
The difference between mechanistic and organic design is concluded in fact that mechanistic design supports efficiency and control while organic design promotes different innovations and changes in the organization. For example, mechanistic design has hierarchical structure while organic design is more flexible in structure. Organic design is based on employee involvement in the process of work with enriched jobs and numerous self-managed teams while mechanistic design is based on traditional jobs with command and control management system.

Question 6: Define organizational culture. What are the major elements at different levels of awareness?
Organizational culture is a special phenomenon which represents a set of beliefs, values and norms connected with the organization and its environment both social and psychological. There are four main elements which exist at different levels of awareness:
Ӣ artefacts which mean the highest level of organizational culture including visible symbols of culture: employees behavior, language, clothes;
Ӣ norms which include unwritten norms of employees behavior;
Ӣ values which denote the most important things for the organization;
Ӣ basic assumptions which concern problem solution.

References
Waddel, Cummings, Worley (2011) Organizational Change, Development & Transformation. 4th Edition, Cengage Learning, South Melbourne.